
Dark Netflix series 'perfect' for Bank Holiday bingeing soars to number 1
New dark comedy drama Sirens is already making waves with viewers on the streamer, and with just five episodes, it's a perfect fit for a lazy day at home.
Sirens only arrived late last week on Netflix, but fans have already been devouring the entire season.
In a Google review, Catherine Woodfield raved: 'Wow. Just wow. I'm sick of shows with too many episodes, not enough 'pace', filler characters. This show is anything but that.
'It makes sense it was a play beforehand because every character, no matter how minor, brings so much to the complex dynamics of the show/world.'
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Another fan, Muhammad Ishfaq, described the show as 'witty with a darker tone, and funny with a subtle touch of pain'.
He added: 'It's suspenseful, satirical and stylish. But above all it's the female lead trio that captivates you with it's superb performance.'
Others praised the 'faultless cast' and 'fresh script', while someone else hailed the 'high caliber' acting and described the show as 'a good study in power across classes'.
It's not taken people long to get hooked, with X user Margot revealed they were totally impressed from start to finish.
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'Binge watched sirens on Netflix and even though it was only 5 ep I really liked it. Cannot remember the last time i was surprised by a show like this,' they wrote.
'I did not expect certain plot twists and definitely didn't think it was going to end the way it did. great performances from trio.'
'Sirens had been on Netflix for 24 hours and I finished the series and am completely obsessed! Please renew for another season @netflix,' begged @dimplz20, while @sweetestKAYpe added: 'Done sat up here and watched the whole 1st season of SIRENS on Netflix.'
Julianne Moore, Milly Alcock and Meghann Fahy take the lead in Sirens as Michaela Kell, her assistant Simone DeWitt, and Simone's sister Devon respectively.
Simone and Devon's dad Bruce (Bill Camp) gets diagnosed with early-onset dementia, and so Devon travels to Michaela's luxury island to confront her sister for not being present. More Trending
But there is a lot more than meets the eye in Molly Smith's series, with a cast that also boasts the likes of Glenn Howerton and Kevin Bacon.
Meanwhile, Julianne recently told Metro why shows like Sirens and The White Lotus – which focus on and critique the wealthy – are catching on.
''I think recently, and it's happened globally too. There's been this great disparity where so few of the population has so much of the wealth.
View More »
'Rightly so, people are intrigued and baffled and confused about why there should be this vast separation. So I think that's why we have suddenly this plethora of shows that are investigating what this is [about],' she explained.
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Spectator
an hour ago
- Spectator
What I learned from running my own Squid Game
You know how this story goes. The cameras are rolling. The audience is cruel. You're trapped in the game and the game is death and the game is going out live from the heart of the state of nature where empathy is weakness and you kill each other off until there's only one left. What will you do to survive? Who will you become if you do? This is the plot of Squid Game, Netflix's Korean mega-hit that just drew to its gory conclusion. It is also the plot of The Hunger Games, Battle Royale, The Running Man, Chain-Gang All-Stars and The Long Walk. We have spent several decades watching desperate people slaughter each other for survival to entertain the rich and stupid. Future generations will probably have thoughts about why we kept returning to this particular trope with the bloodthirsty voyeurism we associate with Ancient Rome. Obviously, these stories are meant to say something about human nature, and the depraved things desperate people can be made to do to each other; they're meant to say something about exploitation, and how easy it is to derive pleasure from someone else's pain. Squid Game says these things while shovelling its doomed characters through a lurid nightmare playground where they die in cruel and creative ways. After each deadly game, blood-spattered contestants are offered a chance to vote on whether to carry on playing. It's a simple referendum: if a majority votes to stay, they're all trapped in the death-match murder circus with only themselves to blame. If they object, a masked guard will accuse them of interrupting the free and fair elections and shoot them in the face. This is everything Squid Game has to say about representative democracy. 'I wanted to write a story that was an allegory or fable about modern capitalist society,' said director Hwang Dong-hyuk, just in case you didn't get the message. The whole thing is as subtle as a shopping-mall shooter. I'm reliably informed that the English-language translations strip away a degree of nuance, which probably helps audiences in parts of the Anglosphere where irony is an unaffordable foreign luxury and the experience of everyday economic humiliation feels a lot like being hit over the head with a huge blunt analogy. Squid Game does not want you confused about who the baddies are. There's a bored cabal of cartoon billionaires drinking scotch and throwing tantrums while they watch our heroes shove each other off cliffs. They smoke cigars and say things like 'I am a very hard man to please'. We never get to find out who they are or what their plan is, because it doesn't matter. How could it possibly matter? How could anything matter in a fake hotel lobby where all the furniture is naked ladies? This is how people who want to be rich think people who are rich ought to talk: like insurance salesmen cosplaying sexual villainy in a kink club for tourists. Nobody is supposed to be able to relate to the Squid Game villains. As it turns out, though, I can. There's an innocent explanation for how I came to run my own Reality Show of Death Game. Well, mostly innocent. I happen to have a secret other life as an immersive game designer. It's what I did instead of drugs during my divorce, after discovering that here, finally, was a hobby that would let me be a pretentious art wanker and a huge nerd at the same time. The games are intense – like escape rooms you have to solve with emotions. Many of them revolve around some species of social experiment – the kind that actual researchers can't do any more because it's inhumane. 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I wrote and rewrote the script to make sure players wouldn't be able to opt out of picking one person to bully to death. I thought that it would be easy. Instead, I learned two surprising things. The first was that it's harder than you'd think to design a scenario where ordinary people plausibly hunt each other to death. Every time, my players tried their very hardest not to hurt each other, even when given every alibi to be evil. I created a whole rule system to punish acts of altruism, spent ages greasing the hinges on the beautiful hellbox I'd built for them, and still the ungrateful bastards kept trying to sacrifice themselves for one another. Even the ones who were explicitly cast as villains. Even when it was against the rules. It takes a lot of fiddly world-building to make violent self-interest feel reasonable. It takes a baroque notional dystopia and a guaranteed protection from social punishment. What you get is a manicured, hothouse-grown garden masquerading as a human jungle – an astroturfed Hobbesian state of nature where the cruelty is cultivated to make viewers feel comfortable in complicity. The story of these games scrapes the same nerves as the ritual reporting about shopping-mall riots on Black Friday – the ones that lasciviously describe working-class people walloping each other for a £100 discount on a dishwasher. The message is that people who have little are worse than people who have more. This is a wealthy person's nightmare of how poor people behave. The rich, of course, are rarely subject to this sort of moral voyeurism. But that story isn't true. In the real-life Lord of the Flies, the children actually worked together very successfully. In the real-life Stanford prison experiment, the guards had to be coached into cruelty. Real poverty, as sociologists like Rutger Bregman keep on telling us, is actually an inverse predictor of selfish behaviour. Not because poor people are more virtuous than anyone else, but because the rich and powerful can afford not to be. The rest of us, eventually, have to trust each other. The fantasy of these games is about freedom from social responsibility. In the Death Games, nobody has to make complex and demeaning ethical choices as an adult person in an inhumane economy. In the Death Games, it makes sense to light your integrity on fire to survive. But if we did, actually, live in a perfectly ruthless market economy where competition was the essence of survival, none of us would survive past puberty. The Death Games don't actually tell us anything about how life is. They show us how life feels. The second surprising thing I learned while running my own Squid Game is that nothing feels better than running Squid Game. If you need a rush, I highly recommend building a complicated social machine to make other people hurt each other, picking out a fun hyperpop soundtrack and then standing behind a production desk for five hours jerking their strings and cackling until they cry. People apparently like my game. It has run in multiple countries. And every time, it took me days to come down from the filthy dopamine high. It turns out that I love power. This was an ugly thing to discover, and there's an ugly feeling about watching a show like Squid Game – which is, to be clear, wildly entertaining. Voyeurism is participation, and the compulsive thrill of watching human beings hurt each other for money creates its own complicity. The audience is not innocent. Sit too close to the barrier at the beast show and you risk getting splashed with moral hazard.


Daily Mail
4 hours ago
- Daily Mail
Beloved ITV detective show slapped with 'trigger warning' for crime scenes in 'woke' move
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Metro
8 hours ago
- Metro
Coronation Street star confirms 'messy and heated' future for Danielle
To view this video please enable JavaScript, and consider upgrading to a web browser that supports HTML5 video Hell hath no fury like that of a woman scorned as Theo Silverton (James Cartwright) finds out next week when he's left reeling after learning of his wife Danielle's (Natalie Anderson) new relationship… After a painful restorative justice session off the back of lamping conversion therapy preacher, Noah Hedley (Richard Winsor), Todd Grimshaw (Gareth Pierce) finds himself becoming privy to some particularly juicy information regarding his boyfriend Theo's wife, Danielle, learning that she is now in a relationship with the wicked preacher… When asked if her character's new relationship meant she'd put her marriage to Theo in the rear-view mirror, Natalie told us: 'Honestly, I don't think she's there. 'I've had this conversation with James, who plays Theo. It's such a rushed relationship, she had the fling with Jason then this is another big thing.' 'There's two things going on. One is trying to show Theo what he's missing with his family life, this is what he's throwing away. 'And there might be an element of her trying to fill the void, Danielle and Theo were married for 19 years, that's a huge amount of time. I've been with my husband 20 years and can't even imagine him not being around. It's a little bit of a rebound.' '[Noah and Danielle] have known of each other and grown up together through the faith with Theo. She has a line about the history between Noah and Theo and says it was their business, she believes Noah was just trying to do right by him. 'They've all come through the church upbringing together. felt for her like a natural person to fill the void of Theo. But also its probably quite pointed, of all the people she could've dated its someone who made his life quite uncomfortable as he was part of Theo's conversion therapy.' As Theo, Danielle and their kids come together at the Bistro, Todd is quick to spill the tea regarding what he's learned…leading to another violent altercation for the fractured family, with Theo accidentally striking his son, Miles (Lewis William Magee). Does Natalie think that Danielle would've revealed the news off of her own back? She says: 'Yes from a perspective of co-parenting she was planning on telling him, and was probably waiting to manage her own feelings first – before Todd steals her thunder and throws her under the bus!' On the Bistro confrontation, Natalie says: 'It all gets a little bit heated, Miles in particular is very upset with Todd, he goes for him and Theo tries to stop him. In the melee this incident happens where Miles ends up with a bloody nose. For Danielle, Todd is at the root of all of this – whether it was an accident or not, Todd has spoilt this and is the thorn in their side.' Todd seeks advice from his ex Billy Mayhew (Daniel Brocklebank), who calls round and sees bedding on the sofa and implores him to speak with Danielle, who's since banned Theo from seeing his kids… On how that particular conversation goes? Natalie teases: 'Her kids are her life she'll do anything to protect them. 'When Todd reaches out, she does want to take that seriously, until Todd starts being Todd and tries to manipulate the situation and throws his little daggers in there! She's not having any of it and has to go back to the drawing board. Playing those scenes was brilliant.' When Natalie was asked what's to come for Danielle, she said: 'As you can imagine it does get messier and more heated. We fall into two camps between Danielle and Theo, and the children will be caught in the middle of that. It is difficult, and representative of a lot of families going through messy divorces. 'That's been amazing to play and its not something I've done before, there's a lot of figuring out what's next and figuring out what's best for the children. How do we feel about Danielle so far? 'When it starts to become a legal thing, how nasty does that get? It's one thing trying to sort it out between yourselves, but when it gets to that next level things becomes more weaponised. There are some calculating things coming up, I'm not sure the audience will still be on Danielle's side after that!' More Trending On her own journey to the heralded cobbles, Natalie describes her excitement and delight at joining the nations most famous street. '…being in the Grimshaw's with Sue Cleaver and Ryan Thomas, oh my god I'm in Coronation Street with Eileen telling Jason off! I almost forgot I was in the scene I was just watching their spat! I was meant to have left and just stood there in the doorway watching it. Amazing. My first scene in Roy's Rolls with David Neilson was incredible. Getting to shout my head off in the Rovers at Tina O'Brien was another highlight, that was proper!' View More » Coronation Street airs Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 8pm on ITV1 or stream from 7am on YouTube and ITVX. If you've got a soap or TV story, video or pictures get in touch by emailing us soaps@ – we'd love to hear from you. Join the community by leaving a comment below and stay updated on all things soaps on our homepage. MORE: All Coronation Street video spoilers for next week as return is confirmed MORE: Exit story confirmed for Coronation Street character months after debut MORE: Todd horrified in Coronation Street as he discovers who sinister Noah's girlfriend is